Victory and Vengeance
by Darlingplease
Summary: This macabre, sickening reality where the stench of rot and decay and dead hope permeated every room and moment and creature. This reality where white seemed such an absurd color on the macabre, sickening man-wolf-beast-monster that sat back on its pale haunches between her naked, trembling thighs.


**Victory and Vengeance**

A laugh as joyful and thick as vomit pushed at Karou's pebble-studded lips. The irony of life was not lost on her. No, not on her. Not on she whose dream of love and life had brought so much desolation and death.

She thought back to a time when Brimstone had warned her against inessential penises. Well, what would he think of this?

This macabre, sickening reality where the stench of rot and decay and dead hope permeated every room and moment and creature. This reality where white seemed such an absurd color on the macabre, sickening man-wolf-beast_monster_ that sat back on its pale haunches between her naked, trembling thighs.

If Brimstone had had any sense, Thiago would have had the face of a pig and the slithering, coiling body of a serpent. The black and shriveled and unlookatable visage of some terrible and unnamed chimera race. Something that matched his soul, his heart.

Karou thought that Thiago must have been the first tear to leave the eye of Ellai. The first bitter tear, so full of anger and hatred and unforgiveness as it fell to the earth—to Eretz.

Shame, shame, that this White Wolf was her blood, her kin.

And so, what would Brimstone deem this penis that stood disgustingly proud, aroused—at her pain, her fear—before her?

Not inessential.

Vulgar, sickening. An R word that she couldn't quite bring herself to utter.

She refused to meet his pale ghost eyes so full of victory and vengeance, just as his gonfalon decreed. He held her struggling hands in one of his, and with the claws of the other hand shredded her thin shirt until it hung in tatters off of her skinny, underwhelming body. With a fearsome cry, she tried to hide her exposed flesh but that only served to make Thiago more aware of her shame, as though it were neon in the desert night.

Her head still spun from him hitting her and she tasted her own blood and there was no knife hilt pressing uncomfortably against her ankle and her boot was empty, empty, empty as she was now. Pulped, cored out, hollowed. She was a wound hollowed out and filled with scratchy, unfeeling gauze. Pain was an outside thing, far away, like the thousands of pin prick stars above her.

She kept moving, fighting, but her human muscles were fallible, faltering things. What do diamonds and jade and iron really amount to in the end?

And his hands, his terrible hands with their points ending in blade-nails that grasped so ludely at the two mounds of goosebumped flesh that she so despised in that moment. His hands that cut the flesh of belly, hips, thighs—places where sparks and kisses had been so sweetly laid only a lifetime ago—until blood ran rivers across her moon pale skin and his.

_Ellai, Ellai, how cruel can a name be? How cruel can a person be?_ And Karou didn't know if she spoke of Thiago, or Brimstone, or herself.

Thiago's sharp wolf teeth sunk into her breast and Karou dug her head into the sharp pebbles and screamed her anger at the earthly moon. His mouth sunk southerly, ripping, biting, tearing, white hot.

And Karou sunk too, into a place where Issa showed up, or Akiva was somehow coming to save her, or Brimstone was alive. Brimstone.

Fantasy in a real place where Thiago's bloody lips whispered the words, "Let me in," with humor in his voice and she feels, fills. Pain is no longer a distant thing, but _right_ _there_. As real as the dead bodies in the pit beside her, and the live bodies only several feet away that continue to ignore her tearing screams. As real as the knowledge that she is alone.

And as Thiago's heavy body, slick with her blood, pumped and her ears filled with his animalistic noises and a deep sense of violation settled into her every pore and bone and atom, she imagined Brimstone. She imagined his ram's horns cracking open Thiago's skull, his huge hands grasping Thiago's neck, throwing him to the hungry, gulping maw of the pit. Brimstone with his voice like thunder and shadow colliding would speak his words of sorrow and regret and Karou would crumple like thin paper against his wide father chest and he would shield her exposed form, and perhaps make her anew, and she would tell him that she had loved him always, even when it didn't seem that way, and even when he scratched her arms and threw her into the icy Prague night and even when—

She turned her head and vomited onto Thiago's hand as he continued to restrain her. The White Wolf made a sound of disgust and shook his hand in the air to clean it off. He was disgusted with her; she might have laughed.

Instead, she took the half second of freedom to claw at Thiago's face and kick. She raked her nails across his eye and felt the flesh whittle away under them. Angry and growling, his hands closed around her throat and his thrusts came with an intensity that made her weep and ache with sharp pain.

Her trachea was crushed under his grip, making it impossible to breathe. She frantically tried to push his hands away. Her vision became hazy, black and white.

Unconsciousness would be a reprieve from her pain, they both knew that. Freshly subdued, Thiago released Karou's bruised neck.

He leaned back to admire his work, a lazy smile metastasizing like cancer across his face.

With a quiet _whiz_, a blade flew through the air and lodged deeply into the White Wolf's neck.


End file.
